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In this book, Sally Swartz, a psychoanalytic therapist and psychology professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, grapples with the “unconscious of psychoanalysis” (p. 4) in the colonial imagery of Africa through three sections of inquiry—colonial, anti-colonial and decolonial. Drawing upon ethnographic and psychiatric accounts of African culture as well as the early psychoanalytic writings of Freud and Jung, Swartz examines how the histories of colonialism and psychoanalysis are co-constitutive. She explains the psychoanalytic implications of colonialism for the colonized, using the anti-colonial and psychoanalytic writings of Frantz Fanon. Each section ends with clinical implications detailing the psychic and political manifestations of shifting orders of hierarchy amidst reconstructed imaginaries of Self and Other in psychoanalysis.
In chapter 2, “The Colonial Freud and Jung” (pp. 8-42), Swartz reveals the early overlaps of psychoanalytic theory with colonialism, tracing how psychoanalysis was born in the world of Darwinian superiority. The European colonizers not only had to exercise control over the colonized and civilize their minds, but also had to navigate their own anxieties of “regressing to a primitive state” (p. 17). Informed by ethnographic and psychiatric accounts of “indigenous communities,” Swartz examines the ways in which “entanglements of difference, the Other, and the ‘primitive’” (p. 17) persist in the psychoanalytic writing of Freud and Jung, continuing “to underwrite and trouble psychoanalytic theory” (p. 17). The contention is not only with the way Freud in Totem and Taboo and Jung in Memories, Dreams and Reflections equate indigenous communities as primitive stages of the mind. This idea is rooted in the imagination of psychoanalysis itself as a colonial enterprise with primitive levels of the psyche–in a routine psychoanalytic view connected to early individual developmental defenses–having phylogenetic origins bearing racial tra